Friday, 2/3/12

Joel Kaplow’s New York Times crossword

NY Times crossword solution, 2 3 12 0203

I don’t know how old Joel Kaplow is. My guess is 65+ based on the fill, because there are a lot of answers that felt pre-Shortzian to me. The six intersecting 15s were all fine, if not particularly exciting (though the SINGING TELEGRAM is fun). But then there’s a Grand Parade of Crosswordese of Yore. When I filled in Captain Hook’s buddy SMEE, I said to myself, “At least it isn’t SNEE.” And then SNEE was on the other side of the grid! Oh, dear. And ESCARP, a [Fort's steep slope], is pursued by a [Click beetle], or ELATER. ELATER! How the hell are ya? I haven’t seen you in ages. ORIBI, ESTE, plural NEAPS, Roman numeral MCML, plural LYES… none of those felt fresh. And ELENA Verdugo, the lesser of the ELENAs now that Elena Kagan’s on the Supreme Court. (True story: I had to Google her last name because I blanked on it and knew Kardashian wasn’t quite right.)

Paula ABDUL, by the way, has been axed from The X Factor. That was just in the “news” a couple days ago.

I think ORTON is usually clued with playwright Joe, right? Nice change-up to have [NFL QB Kyle] this time—I knew that one. Though one wonders why there are two abbreviations in the clue when the answer isn’t curtailed in any way.

I love seeing PAPI clued as a [Spanish term of endearment], and MAINE is [Where "ayuh" is an affirmative]—fun clue, that.

Weird to have AL GORE cross-referenced this way. [4-Down's grp.] mystified me. What organization is he part of?? Turns out it’s DEMS, but I feel he’s transcended partisan politics in recent years.

Weirdest answer in the puzzle: Well, it’s no HASA DIGA EEBOWAI (that was in this week’s Fireball crossword, I kid you not), but HOG SCORE, a [Curling rink line seven yards from the tee], is right up there in the ranks of “Say what?” answers. Do Canadians know this sort of term? Because curling really isn’t in the typical American crossword solver’s portfolio of sports interests. Strange.

2.75 stars.

David Steinberg’s Los Angeles Times crossword

LA Times crossword solution, 2 3 12

Five theme answers are warped by having RE- added to the start of the last word:

17a. [Communications problem?] is a PHONE RECALL.

20a. [Summary of a shrinking mass?] sounds like it’s about a tumor, but it’s a POLAR ICE RECAP.

36a. [Title for the longest bridge?] clues EXTENSION RECORD.

50a. [Construction site order?] is “RAISE THE REBAR!”

57a. [Hardly the award for Chernobyl?] is BEST REACTOR. Fukushima also gets a Razzie award for nuclear reactors.

Do note that the top and bottom pairs of theme answers overlap, and that the grid’s middle has a sinuous swath of white space. While the grid design is ambitious, it does bring about some compromises, such as the EBW/TERN/HSIA/ET TU/ARRET/EPEE run—none of those answers excite me. There’s plenty of other lackluster short fill—SNA DIDI ITE OON UTE NAUT YOO! I suspect the average new solver would look at those entries and say “whoa, maybe crosswords aren’t for me.” (Granted, the Friday puzzle isn’t aimed at newbies, but do they know that?)

My favorite answer is the 40a: [Two-part answer], “YES AND NO.”

Matt Gaffney mentioned the other day that “THAIS has appeared 8 times in the NYT since 1993, all 8 times referring to…wait for it…the Massenet opera.” So hey! Look at that: 42a is THAIS, clued as [Bangkok natives]. Yay, not opera!

34a. [2011 World Series MVP: 2 wds.] = DAVID FREESE. Um, I’ve never heard of him and needed tons of crossing letters. Not a big baseball fan here.

45a. [What the Texas Rangers needed in Game 6 to win the 2011 Series: 2 wds.] = ONE STRIKE.

53a. [Color on a 16-Across uniform] = RED.

Cardinals Hall of Famers STAN MUSIAL and BOB Gibson are in the grid, as are other baseball terms and names—a BAT, batters’ AVERAGES, ACE pitchers, Pete ROSE, ROD Carew, NED Yost, and VIN Scully. Muhammad ALI, a couple tennis words, and an Olympic skier round out the sports content. Probably not the easiest puzzle for someone who doesn’t follow sports, but a breeze for hardcore baseball fans.

Steve Salitan’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Don’t!”

WSJ crossword solution, 2 3 12 "Don't!"

Steve’s theme is “Don’t!” with that word excised from various imperatives:

16d. [Second-story man's advice to a prospective partner?] = QUIT YOUR DAY JOB. I confess I don’t understand the clue at all. Consulting the dictionary… okay, a second-story man is a burglar who breaks into a house via the upstairs window. I still don’t get it. Is upstairs burglary typically more of a daytime crime, not a nighttime one?

52d. [Demeter's weather command?] = RAIN ON MY PARADE. Again, true confession time. The goddess Demeter is associated with parades? Or is inordinately fond of rain? Wikipedia says “In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, who presided over grains, the fertility of the earth, and the seasons (personified by the Hours). Her common surnames are Sito (σίτος: wheat) as the giver of food or corn/grain and Thesmophoros (θεσμός, thesmos: divine order, unwritten law) as a mark of the civilized existence of agricultural society. Though Demeter is often described simply as the goddess of the harvest, she presided also over the sanctity of marriage, the sacred law, and the cycle of life and death.” Well! Clear as mud, then.

Today’s mystery person is 66d: [Tim who created TV's "Heroes"], Tim KRING. I watched the show and didn’t know this name.

My favorite clue is 70a: [Money for Monet, e.g.]. A TYPO! Cute. Good thing I understood the clue, because the only place I ever encounter the crosswer 71d: PAWL is in crosswords. It’s a [Ratchet bar] of some sort.

It’s quip time in today’s CrosSynergy crossword, featuring this [pithy quote by Gertrude Stein]: I LIKE A VIEW / BUT I LIKE TO / SIT / WITH MY BACK / TURNED TO IT. Cute quip, but there’s not much to say about it.

My favorite parts of the puzzle were the wide open corners and the TAPIOCA, the [Pudding type], running down the middle (and connecting with the theme entries in three places!). MANI-PEDI is a great and satisfying answer for regular solvers; we are used to seeing one or the other in our grids, so the full pair feels like a nice indulgence (how apt, in this case). UPSTREAM and WIDE-EYED are likewise fun.

Bonus points for the Q sitting right there in the number 1 box. QUEEG, the [Captain of the U.S.S. Caine], and QUICHE, the [Pielike brunch fare] get the puzzle off to a whimsical start.

I made it a little hard on myself by trying WAVE as the [Ocean motion] (it was TIDE) and DISMAYED instead of WIDE-EYED for [Amazed]. Heck, I even tried HULA as the [Festive time] instead of NOEL. I guess my mind is wanting a vacation to the islands. It took me a while to find COW SHED, the [Bovine abode]. “Cow” came easily enough, but “shed” was new to me. But the crossings convinced me it had to be right. Never heard of OPI, the [Popular brand of nail polish], either, but here again the crossings came to the rescue.

My favorite clue was [It's just over a foot] for ANKLE. In my case, WAISTLINE would have been a viable answer too (in the sense that I have to suck in my gut if I want to see my feet). That reminds me–time for dessert!

With the campaign races, fundraising, and all the political news coverage going on, it’d be understandable to assume from the title that this puzzle would somehow be a commentary on the trials and tribulations of Super PACs, posturing, and pandering.

But noooooooooo, these ready-for-prime-time players are TV CHEFS, as revealed in the central across answer to [Names at the end of 17-, 26-, 41-, and 55-Across].

17a. [Unflattering comparison for a fruitcake] HOCKEY PUCK, which suggests Wolfgang Puck, an Austrian restaurateur known for, among other things, frozen pizzas; draw your own conclusions. Factette: Nowadays hockey pucks are discs made of vulcanized rubber, but their ancestors were spherical and square (cuboid?) and made of wood. For more, see Wikipedia.

26a. ["Texas Justice" alternative] JUDGE JOE BROWN, indicating Alton Brown, relatively mild but highly entertaining mad kitchen scientist and host of Good Eats. For further investigation, see molecular gastronomy and, in parts, Nathan Myhrvold’s landmark tome. Both Texas Justice and Judge Joe Brown are television shows with the truthistic trappings of legal proceedings. Texas Justice went off the air in 2005, so the clue would read better with a “onetime.”

41a. [Group called Girls Tyme when they lost on "Star Search" in 1993] DESTINY’S CHILD, leading to the grande dame of American cooking shows, Julia Child. Not much to say about her because she continues to flood the public consciousness via books, films, and whatnot, such as Being Julia and Julia and Julia and I Was a Teenage Julia.

55a. [Vacuum tube type] CATHODE RAY, aka perky Upstater Rachael Ray.

Fine theme, which immediately put me in mind of the mid- to upscale downtown Manhattan purveyor, Broadway Panhandler, which is two or three locations removed from Broadway and currently resides on 8th Street, aka Shoeland. However, I feel JUDGE JOE BROWN is weak because—even though it’s the title of a program—is also the name of a person. Maybe something like VAN DYKE BROWN would have been better; yes it’s one letter too short and includes the name of a person (but doesn’t constitute a person inandofitself), but I’m sure you get the idea. I was also distracted that the clue for DESTINY’S CHILD, although an interesting bit of trivia, references a prime-time television show while the other three answers do not.

There’s also an allied bit of long fill at 26d [Cook for whom a culinary award is named] JAMES BEARD. Normally long and full-name fill is welcomed, but I’m leery of this one because its symmetrical partner, TELEPORTED, while nice, has nothing to do with the theme. 8d NECKBONE, on the other hand, is fine because it’s only tangentially related to the theme; it’s also a great entry.

Other notes:

The fill at 1a and 21a, FIVEK and LAINK, look vaguely Czech at first, but they break down to FIVE K [High school cross country race, typically] and LA INK (Reality show featuring Kat Von D (or VOND, if you prefer).

Not being enough of a Star Wars geek, I’m not sure whether the clue for 29a is correct. ["Empire Strikes Back" attack bot] AT-AT, “All-Terrain Armored Transport”—I confess I thought it was something like “All-Terrain Attack-Tetrapod” before I looked it up. Anyway, is it a vehicle, a bot, a robot, a droid, what?

4d [Great Smokey Mountains Deer] ELK is either an easy or tricky clue, depending on your level of knowledge. (1) If one is completely ignorant, one wont know that ELK is the most common cervid in crosswords; (2) if one is mildly crossword-literate but ignorant of faunal distribution, then the answer is a gimme; (3) if one is knowledgeable about localized extinctions, one will realize that ELK are long gone from the Tennessee–North Carolina location of that national park; (4) if one is current with conservation efforts or has visited the park recently, one would be aware that a viable population of Cervus canadensis was reintroduced to the area in 2001. Whew!

I have yet to make up my mind about gotcha! part-of-speech clues like 7d [Rock, paper, or scissors] NOUN.

34d [Lime quantity] TWIST feels off to me. It’s more of an incarnation than a quantity. On the other hand, a similar use of lime is a slice, and that’s definitely a quantity. Still, I’d have preferred “garnish” in the wording.

Favorite clues: 36d [Mystic's charms] CRYSTALS. Sneaky because these charms are the tangible kind. The flashy 9d [Teacher's comment that she maybe might write near sentences sort of like this current clue here] AWK[ward]! (frag.)

Even though it’s also an abbreviation, it’s nice to see an alternative to Robert Louis Stevenson. 40d RLS stands for restless leg syndrome.

I feel obligated to mention the non-self-referential 12d [Popular subway pastime] CROSSWORD. Trying to solve on the train has always frustrated me because I’d have to wait for the stops to rapidly write down all the mentally accumulated fill. Hate shaky writing!

Now this is a sort of theme I like! No strained wordplay, no ambitious tricks, just some interesting information, presented in a bite-size griddy format. The eight (!) theme entries trade on the tendency for redundancy when combining English descriptive terms with names from foreign languages that are already descriptive. I was familiar with two of these, but was happy to see them, and was glad to learn some new ones.

Fun, fun! Nevertheless, it won’t convince me to patronize Little Caesar’s pizzerias. 58 theme squares is darn respectable. Plus, there’s a minimum of frass in the fill. Really, the “worst” are the abbreviation HGT for “height” and the initialism DNR for “do not resuscitate,” and they aren’t at all offensive.

26 Responses to Friday, 2/3/12

HOGSCORE? I used to watch curling on a weak TV signal from Toronto when I lived in Buffalo (and I loved the game). Hogline is what it is called in any reference I’ve seen and the sports commentators just called it “the hog”. Yes, an obscure NYT. Oh, that time in Buffalo was 40+ years ago. That makes me 65+ but young at heart.

No disrespect to the constructor, but the puzzle felt incredibly bland. Not a single scrabbly letter, the overused 15s, the dreaded crosswordese plus what Amy mentioned. Far from a typical zippy Times (Friday) puzzle we’re so used to seeing.

1A Had me thinking “A Christmas Carol”… First entry was SHEA, I’ve been Americanised! Wanted to cram in TOKTOKKIE for “Click Beetle”. Also: I wish we got long geography answers like ALEUTIANISLANDS every day! I admit I looked at the C and R of HOGSCORE sceptically when MHP didn’t appear, but then I saw TeS and ELANa/MINIATURa (ELANA is “Barcelona silver medalist Meyer”)…

LAT: Theme answers were fun, especially RAISETHEREBAR. The short fill bothered me far more than the NYTs, though I take exception to TERN being lumped with the rest. It’s a perfectly common seabird, and no ERNE! Per Matt Ginsberg’s database, before today 4/7 LAT THAIS referred to the people, including the clue “‘Rama IX’ subjects”. Please no-one add RAMAIX to their dbs!

Amy, regarding the InkWell: AT-AT is indeed armoured transport, meaning that they were manned by, well, men (or women). Not a bot, in my books. In fact, even if they were piloted by robots/droids/whatever, the AT-AT itself would still not be a bot. Got the answer easily enough from the clue, but I’m not happy about it.

My, but this is old school. “Hog-score” – spelt with the hyphen according to the OED – is apparently what they once called the hog line in Scotland. Perhaps they still do, as the definition fits the clue to a, ahem, tee. The last citation is 1857. The first is 1787 by none other than the national poet, Robert Burns, in these (immortal?) lines from “Tam Samson’s Elegy”:

Oh, no! How I wish I could retract that remark associating you with intonations from Olympus, p! The Ink Well review is quite deft and witty, as per usual with you. I laughed out loud several times whilst reading it.

pannonica: whoops! Sincerest apologies for the slight – talk about gross negligence. FWIW I agree with DM – always enjoy the reviews. But then, I appreciate the wit and wisdom of every reviewer on this site. I wouldn’t be on here numerous times every day (when I should be working) were that not the case.

Re: CrosSynergy, [Sporty Pontiac that's the subject of a Beach Boys song] clues GTO. “Little GTO” was a hit for Ronny & the Daytonas, although there does exist a bootleg of a never-officially-released version by the Beach Boys. Curious clue, that, especially for Blindito.

@mitchs: The Celebrity crosswords are exclusively available via the Facebook app Crosswords. Also available at the app:

1. The Newsday puzzle (in an online solving format some of us prefer to the one at Stan Newman’s website). Six 15x15s and a 21×21 on Sunday.

2. The CrosSynergy/Washington Post crossword. Six themed and one themeless 15×15 each week.

3. Under the “AV Club” rubric, there’s a new Patrick Blindauer puzzle not published elsewhere, along with both of Brendan Emmett Quigley’s weekly blog crosswords, Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest, the Onion puzzle, Ben Tausig’s Ink Well crossword, and Matt Jones’s Jonesin’ puzzle.

Plus you can record your solving times (“solve for stats”), solve together with a friend (“doubles”), race a friend to fill in more of the puzzle simultaneously (“head to head”), solve off the clock (“solve for fun”), and eventually take part in online crossword tournaments.

I messed up the crossing of MOTT the Hoople and Mr. ORTON. Tough crossing, Matt makes more sense.
I’ve been curling 10 years and never heard of HOG-SCORE either. In our club, if you hog the rock (don’t get it over the hog line), you owe the piggy bank a quarter, and your teammates may oink at you. Okay, that’s just me.

I curled for a few years and have been watching it on TV for decades. “Hog line”, all the time. “Hog score”, never heard of it. Sounds like something someone unfamiliar with curling found in an ancient rulebook, and someone fact-checked it from the same source. Boo. (Edit: scanning the comments above [but not too closely, avoiding spoilers for the other puzzles], sounds like it really was from an old rule book. Bah.)

As a non-speedy solver I don’t get to all of the puzzles I might be interested in. When I have time to go back it would be great to have a list of rated puzzles to look at. I currently jot down some of the 4 star plus puzzles.
Would anyone else be interested a summary table of puzzle ratings over time? It could have its own web page, be it a tab-delimited downloadable file, or just a once in a while feature – for example puzzles of 2011.

If there is interested is there anyone with the web programming skills/interest in creating a summary?
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